The U.S. Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia—which has spent the last year and a half prosecuting people who protested the president’s inauguration—has been sanctioned by a judge for failing to hand over evidence to the defense, a major breach in court procedure that endangers the justice system itself.

On Jan. 20, 2017—aka J20—Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department threw more than 70 “non-lethal” grenades, sometimes hitting innocent bystanders in the head, and emptied dozens of canisters of tear gas against protesters, before cordoning off more than 200 people and charging them all with a conspiracy to riot. Relying on a theory that anyone in black conspired to destroy property, the federal government charged more than 200 people with breaking just a few windows.

The government was forced to drop the charges against all but 58 of the defendants after losing the first case this January.

Elizabeth Lagesse, one of the 58 remaining defendants, argued in a motion that the government continued to press charges against her not because she committed any crime, but because she talked to the press—including Democracy in Crisis—and filed a civil suit against the police in partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Kerkhoff is leading the case against the protesters.

“Ms. Kerkhoff’s May 11 email also highlights the government’s ongoing fixation with Ms. Lagesse’s media presence and her pending lawsuit—protected conduct that has no relevance to the case,” Lagesse’s motion argues, making reference to an email from the prosecutor, which, it argues, “is filled with derisive asides about Ms. Lagesse’s public statements, which go as far as accusing Ms. Lagesse of spreading ‘misinformation.’”

In that email cited in Lagesse’s motion, Kerkhoff seems to be following Trump’s playbook—”misinformation” is her more legalistic version of “fake news.” (The main detective in the case, Greggory Pemberton, regularly calls me “Fake News Woods.”)

This prosecution has engaged with the seediest parts of the alt-right. In this case, the prosecution relied heavily on a video surreptitiously filmed by Project Veritas, the far-right outfit that brought down ACORN and regularly tries to “sting” media outlets like The Washington Post. Project Veritas is notorious for selectively editing and publishing video, but in this case, the organization looks downright honest in comparison with the U.S. government.

The Project Veritas video shows a group of people planning a march and mentioning an “anti-capitalist, anti-fascist” action. This provides the basis for the conspiracy-to-riot charges—which otherwise hinge on wearing black. It has been central to the government’s case against the protesters, because they claim it proves that defendants planned to destroy property and shut the city down.

But in court last week, it came out that the government did not give the defense attorneys all of the video—three minutes were cut off. During those three minutes, the Veritas operative said: “I don’t think they know anything.” There was also evidence that the Jan. 8, 2017, planning meeting included a session on how to de-escalate a violent situation.

The prosecution further failed to disclose that it had received 69 other recordings from Project Veritas. One of the trial groups had an interview with the operative who said that he didn’t “think anyone was planning violence especially.”

“There were a lot of things that were captured by Veritas. We gave them what was relevant in the case,” said Ahmed Baset, an assistant U.S. Attorney working the case with Kerkhoff, to the judge—as if it is up to the prosecution to determine what is relevant.

The proceedings also revealed that Project Veritas visited the FBI before the inauguration to talk about the protest—and the government revealed nothing about that meeting to the defense, either. While court still did not dismiss all of the charges against all of the defendants, it did sanction Kerkhoff and dismiss the conspiracy charges.

“The evidence concerning the conspiracy and the conspiracy charge … because the government did not disclose those videos and allow proper investigation, I’m sanctioning the government from proceeding on that count or on that theory,” the judge said.

For Dylan Petrohilos, who had been tagged as a key conspirator by the feds, that meant his charges would be dropped altogether, since he was not even arrested at the protest—but was picked up months later when police officers raided his home and took an Antifa flag and copies of The Nation magazine as “evidence” of the conspiracy.

For others, despite the dropped conspiracy charges, the weight of a long prosecution and the potential of a long sentence were still there to bludgeon them. As one defendant, Ella Fassler, tweeted: “It’s starting to look like my co-defendants and I will only be facing up to (about) 10-20 years in prison now.”

After testifying in last week’s trial, one officer named William Chatman wore a shirt with a slogan that condoned police brutality in the courthouse. It said: “Police Brutality...Or Doing What Their Parents Should Have!”

It is a clear message.

This prosecution bears all the hallmarks of Trump’s sense of justice. At virtually the same time all of this was going down in D.C. Superior Court, across town, Trump was underlining the capricious nature of justice in his regime with his pardon of Dinesh D’Souza. Instead of going through the DOJ’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, Trump seems to randomly pick friends, political allies or celebrities. His last big pardon was of former sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for his racism and his hatred of the media.

In ancient Greek political thought, the mark of tyranny was the desire to help one’s friends and to harm one’s enemies—and both the pardon of D’Souza and the prosecution of the J20 protesters are motivated by such a desire.

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a project of alternative newspapers across the country. Email: baynard@therealnews.com. Twitter: @baynardwoods.

Emilio Gutierrez Soto had to flee Mexico a decade ago to seek asylum in the United States—because people there took his journalism too seriously.

He may get sent back because an American judge does not take it seriously enough.

In 2005, on page 10 of El Diario, a Juarez daily, Gutierrez published a story with the headline: “Military personnel rob hotel in Palomas.”

“Six members of the Army, and one civilian who have been positively identified, robbed the guests at a motel in this town on Friday night, taking from them their money, jewelry and other personal belongings,” the story read, according to the translation of Molly Molloy. “The robbers then fled, but not before threatening their victims with death. Yesterday, the victims gave up their right to file formal complaints about the events to denounce the crimes against them, facing the possibility that the threats they had received would be carried out.”

Gutierrez later told Charles Bowden, a great chronicler of the border, that army officials were angry about his story and summoned him to a hotel in the center of the town of Ascension, near Chihuahua Ciudad. He was told: “If you don’t come, we’ll come looking for you at home or wherever you are.”

When he got to the hotel, he was surrounded by soldiers. “You have no sources for that information,” the general said. He asked Gutierrez why he didn’t ever write about the narcotraficantes. Gutierrez confessed that he was frightened of them.

“You should fear us, for we fuck the fucking drug traffickers, you son of a whore. I feel like putting you in the van and taking you to the mountains so you can see how we fuck over the drug traffickers, asshole,” a general said.

“You’ve written idiocies three times, and there shall be no fourth. You’d better not mention this meeting, or you’ll be sent to hell, asshole,” another officer said in a final sendoff.

Gutierrez knew they were serious.

In April 2007, he shared a byline with a reporter named Armando Rodriguez. The story was about a third reporter, Saul Noe Martinez Ortega, who “was found wrapped in a blanket and appeared to have been dead for several days, possibly after his kidnapping that took place last Monday, April 16, in the city of Agua Prieta, Sonora.”

The penultimate line is a gut punch: “It appears that an agent of the Municipal Police was present at the abduction of the journalist, but he did nothing to hinder the kidnappers.”

Molloy added a brutal translator’s note about Gutierrez’s co-writer: “Armando Rodriguez was a well-known crime reporter for El Diario de Juárez. He was shot to death at point-blank range on his way to work in Ciudad Juarez on Nov. 13, 2008.”

Rodriguez had been threatened, but ignored the threats.

“I can't live in my house like a prisoner,” he told the Committee to Protect Journalists. “I refuse to live in fear." Then he was gunned down in his driveway, with his 8-year-old daughter in the back seat.

Gutierrez had left for the United States in June 2008, a few months before the murder of Rodriguez.

Molloy, a border and Latin America specialist at the New Mexico State University Library, hit on the insane logic of the infernal machine that governs the asylum process.

“He received a death threat and he fled rather than waiting around,” Molloy said when I called her up to talk about Gutierrez. “Emilio is seen as in less danger because he is still alive. If you take a threat seriously and flee for your life and seek asylum, people aren’t going to believe your story because you’re not tortured and you’re not dead.”

Gutierrez and his son were separated and held in custody for seven months. Shortly after Obama took office, they were freed. Although Obama was often called the Deporter-in-Chief by immigration activists, Gutierrez attributed his release to the American president.

When he was finally released, Gutierrez and his son went to live in Las Cruces, N.M., in the house of some friends. Bowden had also recently moved to Las Cruces to live with Molloy. Bowden published Gutierrez’s story in Mother Jones, while Gutierrez had a hard time adjusting to life in the U.S.

“He was sort of at a loss for what he was going to do,” Molloy said. “He wanted to write newspaper stories, but he really couldn’t, because he’s living in the U.S. and couldn’t write in English.”

Like so many immigrants, he had to piece together a living, working in landscaping and food service as his request for asylum dragged on. The request was finally denied last December, and Gutierrez and his son Oscar were locked up once again.

Among the reasons that Judge Robert S. Hough gave for denying his request for asylum was a claim that Gutierrez wasn’t really a journalist.

“He didn’t really believe that Emilio was a journalist, because he didn’t produce many articles he had written,” Molloy said, noting that Gutierrez’s house had been ransacked before he left—and that Mexican papers weren’t as fastidious as, say, The New York Times at keeping clips. Nevertheless, she compiled well more than 100 stories bearing his byline—and translated a few of them.

Still, Gutierrez and his son were put in a van and driven toward the border—and what he thinks would be certain death. A last-minute stay halted the van and bought Gutierrez a little more time and another shot at asylum. The Association of Alternative Newsmedia (of which the Independent is a member), the National Press Club and other journalistic organizations have come out in support of Gutierrez.

But the Trump administration’s deep hostility to those seeking asylum from Mexico, along with his hatred of the press, does not bode well for him.

Charles Bowden often wrote that Juarez was the city of the future. Trump’s attacks on the press sound an awful lot like the Mexican general who threatened Gutierrez a decade ago. Trump hasn’t started to actually kill journalists—but sending Gutierrez back to Mexico would be a start.

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a project of alternative newspapers across the country. Email: baynard@therealnews.com. Twitter: @baynardwoods.

When reporter April Ryan asked Trump Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about the failure of authorities in Louisiana to charge the officers who killed Alton Sterling for selling CDs—only days after the police-involved shooting of Stephon Clark in Sacramento—Sanders did the thing that white people have always done to justify killing black people: resort to “local control” or “states’ rights.”

“Certainly a terrible incident, this is something that is a local matter, and that’s something that we feel should be left up to local authorities at this time,” Sanders said.

Maybe another reporter—maybe even a white reporter, because, you know, white reporters can also ask about police killing black people—could have backed her up: “You mean local in the same way that Jefferson Davis did or that George Wallace did?”

But all of the heroes in the White House press corps remained silent. So Ryan asked again. “But how does he feel about that? He was strongly behind police. He supports police as much as America does, but wants to weed out bad policing. What does he say about weeding out bad policing when you continue to see these kinds of situations occurring over and over again?” she asked.

Sanders again invoked a states’ rights argument. “Certainly we want to make sure that all law enforcement is carrying out the letter of the law. The president’s very supportive of law enforcement, but at the same time in these specific cases, in these specific instances, those would be left up to local authorities and (are) not something for the federal government to weigh into,” she said.

If you take that apart, you see that the president supports the cops. And at the same time that he supports them, he doesn’t want to weigh in on anything bad they do. Which equals: He supports them. It is as unambiguous as a dog whistle can be. And, in fact, his Justice Department, run by Klan-loving weed-hater Jeff Sessions, declined to press charges against the officers who killed Sterling back in May.

But most of the national press didn’t want to recognize the dog whistle, because to them, Sanders was right. For them, those were “local stories.” And they aren’t interested in local stories.

Neither are their white liberal audiences. There was a noted sigh of relief when the dominant “woke” hashtag shifted from #BlackLivesMatter, which forced us white people to question our privilege, to #Resistance, which means as long as you aren’t as terrible as Trump, then you are OK.

Why, nationally, aren’t we talking in the same way about the Movement for Black Lives and the disproportionate number of African Americans killed by police? In order to get a sense of this, I called up civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson, who came to prominence for tweeting out the uprising in Ferguson after the killing of Mike Brown by Officer Darren Wilson.

“When I think about how I have changed in the last three or four years—like my lens towards analyzing what's going on is that I now understand better the concrete structures in place that exist to almost guarantee officers don't be held accountable,” said Mckesson, who now hosts the popular podcast Pod Save the People.

Mckesson said that when he went to Ferguson or protested in Baltimore, he didn’t understand those structures—which are largely local.

“When you look at things like Stephon Clark's killing … it is unlikely for the officers to be held accountable even if you get a good attorney general, you get a good prosecutor. The laws and the court precedents are not on our side. The laws in California are not on our side. The policies and the practices at the local level are not on our side,” he said.

But, especially under the Trump DOJ, Mckesson believes that most change will also happen on that level. “There are 18,000 police departments, and most of the change is local. So we believe that if we get a fraction of the largest police departments to create structural change, that will actually ripple across the other ones,” he said.

This ripple effect would work because of the “best practices” doctrine that allows a few endowed institutes or think tanks to design policy not only for policing, but for most industries.

“You change some of the big ones, it will hopefully lead to change in some of the other ones, but this is really local,” Mckesson said, both echoing Sanders’ deflection and turning it back on her.

Still, he recognizes that, in a situation like the Gun Trace Task Force trial in Baltimore, where eight cops were charged by the feds with widespread corruption, no one on a local level was equipped to deal with it. “It was surprising; it was like the layers and layers of people and city government that had to know about this and chose to do nothing,” he said. “There was no mechanism at the city or state level that was there to do anything.”

This is the paradox. The right has, for a long time, seen the fight as local. They have been taking over school boards and other minor positions. But now that Trump is attempting to destroy much of the federal government, the serious work of the left is going to have to turn largely local, while all of the #Resistance pats themselves on the back as they wait for Mueller to save them. Or Stormy Daniels.

Meanwhile, local newsrooms are gutted every day, and the national news is just not interested in the local fights. Because they are obsessed with Trump.

“Donald Trump handles these nitwit reporters with a new and most disgraceful form of bribery,” the great reporter Jimmy Breslin, who died last year, wrote in 1990. He saw what was happening. “The scandal in journalism in our time is that ethics have disintegrated to the point where Donald Trump took over news reporters in this city with the art of the return phone call.”

Trump no longer returns the calls. He doesn’t have to. He has Twitter, and we have all become suckers, obsessing over a national soap opera, where the real change—for good and ill—is happening under our noses, in our own towns.

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a project of alternative newspapers across the country. Email: baynard@therealnews.com. Twitter: @baynardwoods.

Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels used pseudonyms in the non-disclosure agreement worked out by the now-president’s seemingly suicidal lawyer Michael Cohen. They called themselves David Dennison and Peggy Peterson—but Trump still didn’t sign it, which has gotten him into a fresh pile of shit.

Stormy Daniels is already a nom-de-porn, but even people like Trump and Daniels, whose livelihoods require an extreme level of visibility, crave privacy almost as much as they demand a spotlight.

But privacy is contradictory in our half-online lives. We can post without anyone knowing who we are, but we also broadcast the details of our lives on numerous platforms and essentially carry tracking devices in our pockets. Our emails damn us, even in their absence—just ask Hillary—and our texts can be turned against us, as FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page can surely attest to, as theirs were blasted around the world. Our dumb Facebook posts and tweets follow us as we try to move into more respectable environs—see whatever Nazi-sympathizer The New York Times op-ed page hired and fired this week.

In this context, law-enforcement officers are demanding a kind of privacy not afforded ordinary citizens. This is particularly clear in a recent filing in the case against protesters and bystanders caught up in the Disrupt J20 protests against Trump’s inauguration.

After losing the first trial against six defendants late last year and dropping charges against more than 100 others—who needlessly spent months fighting against what were ultimately unsustainable charges—prosecutor Jennifer Kerkhoff is gearing up to try the remaining 58 defendants. She found an undercover agent who has been infiltrating “the anarchist extremist movement” to testify as an expert witness on the “black bloc” technique—wearing black clothes, covering up identifying features and moving as a “bloc.”

The government is charging numerous people who—even prosecutors admit—did not physically break any of the windows that were smashed during the inauguration, and who engaged in no other violence. But if they covered their faces or wore black clothes, they abetted the anonymity of those who did, and are therefore guilty of the crimes, the government claims.

But the government doesn’t want to reveal the name of its witness, who is allegedly an expert on these same techniques—which are intended to protect privacy. Kerkhoff moved that she be called by a pseudonym “Julie McMahon”—with a possible nod to the McMahons of professional wrestling fame, or maybe to a tabloid divorcee who allegedly pursued Bill Clinton and was named “The Energizer” by the Secret Service. However they came up with the name, the government argues that she won’t be able to continue her undercover activity if her identity is known.

“Given the repeated efforts to publicly disseminate identifying information about the prosecutor and law enforcement officers involved in this case (to include an MPD officer who acted in an undercover capacity), the government submits there is a reason to believe that the expert will be targeted in the same manner,” Kerkhoff argues.

Kerkhoff argues that when an undercover police officer testified in the first trials, people identified him. That’s not the fault of the press or the public; don’t call an undercover officer to testify if you don’t want to blow their cover. Or should they get to testify wearing black masks?

“Further, when the MPD officer stepped outside of the courthouse during his testimony, his photograph was taken and was disseminated on multiple social media accounts and in various media outlets,” the motion reads.

When he is outside of the courthouse, it is neither illegal nor illegitimate to take his photograph. Kerkhoff complains again that “as the prosecutors and lead detective left the courthouse, their photograph was taken and published in media outlets.”

So, the black bloc is bad for not wanting to be surveilled and identified—not to mention tear-gassed and hit with chemical grenades—by the state, but the agents of the state deserve anonymity, even in what used to be called “open court.”

The government also went to great lengths to prohibit the public from seeing police body-cam footage—while Det. Gregg Pemberton spent a year combing through all of the personal data on the cellphones of those who were arrested. He has personally told me that he saw me all over the videos he had scoured, and that he was looking for evidence of an illegal action. He is armed. And he is afraid of a photograph?

The department, meanwhile, denied a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Unicorn Riot to see his overtime slips during that period, despite allegations that he had falsely charged the city overtime while defending himself against a DUI charge in a previous case.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington and the MPD fought to protect the identity not only of their undercover officers, but also of the far-right slime-ball Project Veritas operative who infiltrated an alleged planning meeting.

Meanwhile, a list of the names of everyone arrested during the J20 protest was leaked to far-right site Got News from the official police computer of Metropolitan Police Department employee Rachel Schaerr, according to the metadata on the spreadsheet. The names are still on the site which calls them “LEFT-WING ANARCHISTS AND ANTIFA TERRORISTS.”

This is part of a trend in which law-enforcement officials want ever-greater access to information about individual citizens, while seeking to further shield themselves. The Maryland judiciary recently removed the names of police officers from its public database. If I were arrested and cleared of all charges, my name, address and birthdate would have remained public unless I made the effort to expunge it. But the officer who arrested me would have remained unknown to the public. The move occurred amid one of the craziest police-corruption scandals in modern history—and stoked a serious uproar that caused the court to reverse its decision and put the officers’ names back.

“It’s disgusting, and it’s dishonorable,” said David Simon, creator of The Wire, about the attempt to hide police officers’ names in Maryland. “And generations of police officers who were capable of standing by their police work, publicly standing by their use of force, their use of lethal force, and their powers of arrest—those generations are ashamed right now because this present one is pretending they are incapable of that level of responsibility.”

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a project of alternative newspapers across the country. Email: baynard@therealnews.com. Twitter: @baynardwoods.

]]>democracyincrisiscolumn@gmail.com (Baynard Woods)National/InternationalSat, 17 Mar 2018 12:00:00 -0700Democracy in Crisis: Hysteria Over 'The Memo' and a Baltimore Corruption Trial Highlight the Muddled State of Law Enforcement in Americahttp://www.cvindependent.com/index.php/en-US/news/national-international/item/4359-democracy-in-crisis-hysteria-over-the-memo-and-a-baltimore-corruption-trial-highlight-the-muddled-state-of-law-enforcement-in-america
http://www.cvindependent.com/index.php/en-US/news/national-international/item/4359-democracy-in-crisis-hysteria-over-the-memo-and-a-baltimore-corruption-trial-highlight-the-muddled-state-of-law-enforcement-in-america

I got a text from my mom flipping out about The Memo—the document assembled by Fresno-area Congressman Devin Nunes and released, despite intelligence agency concerns, on Feb. 2.

She’s smart but not especially political, and her text made it clear that the #releasethememo movement that began as an alt-right rallying cry had now reached the mainstream. “As a teenager you ranted about the CIA (you were right),” she wrote. “Now the FBI. Can we trust any politician or any government office?”

It was a strange moment for me, because, at the same time every mainstream news network in the country was on “Memo Watch,” I was covering a woefully uncovered trial in Baltimore, where the FBI uncovered a vast police corruption conspiracy after they traced some opioids that killed a young woman back to a drug gang and, upon tapping phones, realized the gang was working with a Baltimore Police officer named Momodu Gondo. When FBI agents tapped his phone, they realized that he and other officers were regularly targeting citizens whom they thought had a lot of cash—to rob.

Over the last three weeks of a federal trial—six of the officers pleaded guilty, while two maintained innocence and stood trial—we have learned that, according to testimony, one officer executed a man point-blank in 2009 because he “didn’t feel like chasing him.” According to Gondo’s testimony, a deputy commissioner came out to the scene to coach everyone on what to say: The victim was about to run them over, and he had to shoot. The deputy commissioner announced his retirement immediately following the testimony.

We also learned that during the uprising following Freddie Gray’s death, Wayne Jenkins—the ringleader of the elite police task force who was also indicted—came to a bail bondsman with two big trash bags of pharmaceuticals stolen from pharmacies and told him to sell them.

The bail bondsman testified that Jenkins came to him with stolen drugs almost every night. Jenkins, who did not testify, has come across as something like a demon. Even Jemell Rayam, who shot the man to keep from chasing him, thought Jenkins’ actions were excessive. Most of the officers said they were scared of him. He is, in Trump’s language, “high-energy,” and is in many ways the perfect image of Trumpian law-enforcement: If people are poor, or black, or immigrants—unprotected—then they are inherently criminal, and nothing you can do to them is criminal.

Jenkins had been involved in this kind of activity since at least 2010, when he and Det. Sean Suiter—who was apparently murdered in November, the day before he was supposed to testify to the grand jury in the case—chased a “target,” causing a fatal car crash, and then planted drugs in the car. Jenkins, as many people testified, was protected by the local power structure.

But the plodding investigations by the FBI—and prosecutions of the U.S. attorneys—brought down Jenkins’ long reign of terror.

This is similar to the story told by David Grann in last year’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which is about how the newly formed FBI was able to break through the white-power structure of 1920s Oklahoma law enforcement and expose local authorities’ involvement in killing hundreds of Native Americans in order to steal their payments from oil on Osage-owned lands.

Yet the national media—which covered every second of the burning CVS during the riots following Freddie Gray’s death—was largely silent about the vast police misconduct revealed in the trial, even though they dovetailed in some uncomfortable ways with the Memo Watch hysteria.

The Memo’s author, Devin Nunes, worked on Trump’s transition team and had a weird midnight Uber ride and secret White House lawn meeting a few months back. He ultimately alleged that the Steele dossier—source of the “pee tape” rumors—was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and used to get a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant on former Trump advisor Carter Page.

The Trump team has long alleged that Page, who has done some bragging about his Russian connections, was nothing more than a “coffee boy”—and that this was an attempt by the FBI to take Trump down.

Ultimately, The Memo was a dud, but it does highlight the weird moment where the right is attacking law enforcement agencies, and the left is valorizing them. It’s not hard to find countless examples of FBI malfeasance—the agency’s COINTELPRO is one of the worst incidents of law enforcement over-stepping in American history, as J. Edgar Hoover and his team plotted illegal, Jenkins-esque ways to destroy the black-militant movement.

The rather young and dashing dynamic duo of federal prosecutors in Baltimore—Leo Wise and Derek Hines—come across as champions of Baltimore’s most vulnerable citizens. But as they pulled out a big bag of black masks and clothes that Jenkins used for burglaries, I couldn’t help but think of their colleague Jennifer Kerkhoff, who, an hour down the road in Washington D.C., is still trying to prosecute 59 people for wearing black clothes during Trump’s inauguration, following a protest where a few windows were broken.

Regardless, the Trumpist attempt to undermine the FBI can be seen as an attempt to protect people like Wayne Jenkins—remember that Trump pardoned the super-racist former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio—in the name of “local control” or “states’ rights.” It is part of what Steve Bannon called the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” an attempt to have lawmen—lawmen in whom the president sees himself—seen as above the law.

Just as testimony in the Baltimore trial wrapped up, it came out that the Trump team was trying to plan a big military parade on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Surely, that will elicit massive protests—and may be a great gift to the lagging and fractured protest movement—but I couldn’t help but imagine Wayne Jenkins, with his grappling hooks and stolen drugs, riding with Arpaio at the front of the whole thing as a perfect picture of Trumpian law enforcement.

But Jenkins better not wear his black burglary clothes—D.C. prosecutors might mistake him for an anarchist and charge him with another conspiracy.

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a project of alternative newspapers across the country. Email: baynard@therealnews.com. Twitter: @baynardwoods.

]]>democracyincrisiscolumn@gmail.com (Baynard Woods)National/InternationalMon, 12 Feb 2018 12:00:00 -0800Democracy in Crisis: Steve Bannon Is Having a Rough Time—but His Plight Pales in Comparison to the Problems of Trump's Victimshttp://www.cvindependent.com/index.php/en-US/news/national-international/item/4306-democracy-in-crisis-steve-bannon-is-having-a-rough-time-but-his-plight-pales-in-comparison-to-the-problems-of-trump-s-victims
http://www.cvindependent.com/index.php/en-US/news/national-international/item/4306-democracy-in-crisis-steve-bannon-is-having-a-rough-time-but-his-plight-pales-in-comparison-to-the-problems-of-trump-s-victims

I went to bed reading Fire and Fury, which, as you probably know, is Michael Wolff’s ribald and riveting account of the early days of the Trump regime. It quickly became clear in the book that no one involved in Trump’s campaign expected, or wanted, him to win.

That was a horrible thought: Trump and his motley crew of enablers, the doltish adult children, sleazeballs like Paul Manafort and Corey Lewandowski, fascists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller—they all overestimated the American people.

They thought we were better than we were. They thought they were safe, because we would never elect Donald Trump.

I went to sleep with this somber thought. At some point in the night, I woke up smelling smoke. I got up and looked around and couldn’t find anything. It was 10 degrees in Baltimore that night, so I assumed it was a neighbor’s fireplace.

Around 9 a.m., my wife woke me. “The dog is acting weird,” she said.

The dog was shaking, pawing at us.

“Smoke!” my wife yelled.

I looked over—and smoke was coming up through the floorboards. Then it burst into flame. By the foot of the bed.

Fire and fury ensued. This is the essence of this year.

Ultimately, the fire in my bedroom wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. The fire department—Big Government!—was there before the fire destroyed much. They cut through the floor and broke the windows. Most of the damage was caused by the smoke. We were safe, and we didn’t lose anything of real value. We have renters’ insurance, and I’m writing this from a hotel, where I spent a lot of time waiting on the bureaucracy of insurance and disaster mitigation. I bought the audio book of Fire and Fury and listened to the rest of it as I threw out former possessions that were now nothing but junk.

However difficult things were for me, it turned out to be much better than what was going on with many of the people in the figurative conflagration of the book—especially Steve Bannon.

Bannon is the almost Ahab-esque antihero of Fire and Fury, which in many ways charts his rise and fall—at least up until the point that the book’s publication precipitated a further fall. For being such a horrendous pseudo-intellectual schlub, Bannon is also fascinating, a far-right svengali. According to Harvard studies, during the last election, Breitbart was three times as influential as its next-closest competitor (measured in terms of retweets and shares), Fox News. Bannon was at least partly responsible for that—and for getting Trump elected.

That perception, that Bannon orchestrated Trump’s victory—as shown in another book, Joshua Green’s Devil’s Bargain—was probably the No. 1 factor in his August White House ouster, even more important than the alt-right terror that ripped apart Charlottesville that month.

In Fire and Fury, though, Bannon is correct about how horrible the Trump kids and Jared Kushner are. It was actually beautiful to listen to him (or Holter Graham, who read the audiobook) railing against the idiocy of Jarvanka—Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

And Jarvanka were also right about him and his whack-job far-right Leninism, reveling in the destruction of the world. That circular firing squad is what makes the book so compelling: All of these people are so disastrously wrong about America, but they are pretty correct when they assess each other’s weaknesses. Bannon’s weaknesses are nearly infinite—and the most important ones are intellectual. Sure he’s a slob and all that, but he is a sexist, racist, “nationalist” who created a section of the Breitbart site called “Black Crime.”

After Wolff quoted Bannon saying that Don Jr.’s Russia meeting was treasonous, the president went on the attack with a new epithet, “Sloppy Steve.” Bannon tried to apologize, saying he was really attacking his predecessor as Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort. But it wasn’t enough. Bannon was fired first from Breitbart and then from his SiriusXM show (with Fox pre-emptively refusing to hire him). Worst of all, billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer, who have supported most of his endeavors and funded his nationalist endeavors, cut ties with their schlubby honey badger.

I watched out all of this play out on cable as I tried to deal with the disaster bureaucracy. And it was delightful to see the pundits all talking about Bannon’s terrible week, even if it came for all the wrong reasons.

Bannon, by the way, did not have the worst week in Washington, D.C., during that particular time. That would go to the more than 12,000 Salvadorans who live in the district; the numbers are far larger if you count the D.C. suburbs, which have large Salvadoran enclaves. Ultimately, a Department of Homeland Security directive to end the temporary protected status for people who came to the U.S. from El Salvador following a 2001 earthquake will affect more than 200,000 people who have been in the U.S. for more than 15 years now. It’s almost impossible to imagine how deeply that will affect their communities.

Bannon may be gone, but this is the essence of the dark alignment of Bannon’s alt-right with Jeff Sessions’ revanchist racism and Trump’s big boner for a border wall. So when Trump was meeting with a group of senators and asked why we have so many people coming here from “shithole countries,” like El Salvador, Haiti (which already had its TPS rescinded) and various nations in Africa, it was clear that it didn’t matter whether or not Bannon was in the White House or “in the wilderness” or not.

Trump, Bannon and their crew may have overestimated the electorate in their expectation of losing. We should not make the same mistake and overestimate them. Whatever happens to Steve Bannon, racists now rule the executive branch.

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a project of alternative newspapers across the country. Email: baynard@therealnews.com. Twitter: @baynardwoods.

Donald Trump’s second year in office is beginning like every new Star Wars movie: The Resistance is in tatters, trying to rebuild.

Yes, there is plenty of Internet #Resistance, ranging from insane conspiracy theories to serious commentary and organizing—but this online profusion has resulted in confusion in real life.

The divide is mirrored in the Bernie/Hillary split—but it is also something deeper and something that moves further to the fringes. The divide, in many ways, mirrors the increasing divisions within the far right, where the alt-lite litigiously differentiates itself from the more openly racist alt-right.

Last year, there was the Disrupt J20 protest on Inauguration Day, which led to the prosecution of nearly 200 individuals, identified by the police and the prosecution as anarchists. The next day, hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets for the women’s march.

There is little sympathy or support between these groups, with many anarchists and hardcore organizers mocking feel-good liberals who #Resist while supporting the FBI, intelligence agencies and Robert Mueller. More mainstream liberals, on the other hand, attempt to distance themselves from anyone further to the left than they are for fear of being tainted by the anarchist stench of “hippies.” As a result, these liberals have been far more concerned about Putin’s abuse of reporters than they have about the prosecution of journalists who were covering the J20 protests. Though these J20 cases have been largely ignored by the mainstream press, they have had an immeasurable effect on the state of protest—creating fear, distrust, and division on the left.

Over the last couple of weeks, some of these tensions have bubbled up, largely in online debates about a real-life rally slated for Washington, D.C., on Jan. 27. The “People’s March on Washington,” also called the “The Impeachment March,” has gained a lot of online support—25,000 are “interested” on Facebook, and more than 2,000 say they are going. It has also gotten a lot of pushback.

The rally was organized by a group called People Demand Action, headed up by a 24-year-old man named Lawrence Nathaniel, who is a big-thinking, marketing-minded millennial leftist who says he worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign and then, after he got over his disappointment following the primary loss, for Hillary Clinton. When Trump won, he began to think about what he could do.

Nathaniel has a long list of sometimes improbable plans and goals, including opening a free, private school in Bamberg, S.C. However, the march calling for the impeachment of the president indeed gained traction. But as interest in the march grew—and organizers began trying to raise money—so did the questions surrounding it.

I first heard questions about the march when Dave Troy, a technologist and writer in Baltimore, wrote to me. Troy is deeply concerned about Russian trolls and “active measures.” When he saw confusion surrounding the event, he initially thought it might be the result of some Kremlin campaign. But after he started to look into it, he attributed the perceived failings of the organizers to inexperience rather than malfeasance.

Nathaniel has set up a number of organizations to promote the march and his various other endeavors. People have been calling them “shell organizations” or “false fronts,” but that seems a little too harsh. The one organization that has filed official papers is called the Presidential House, and it proposes some sort of weird shadow government in Charleston, S.C., with Nathaniel as president. Troy called it “unhinged, fantastical nonsense.”

I called Nathaniel and asked for an explanation.

“When I started the Presidential House I started volunteering for the Obama campaign,” Nathaniel said. He acknowledged that the original scheme was kind of goofy, but said it came from his enthusiasm for Obama. “I was 16 or 17 and was very excited, and so I started something called the Presidential House to get out in my community.”

For Nathaniel, inexperience is part of the point of protest.

“Many of us, especially young people in the political realm, don’t really get our voices heard, because it’s mostly a ‘who has more experience’ type thing versus a protest where we’re able to organize it, either locally or nationally, and our voices can be heard much easier there than working with politics,” Nathaniel said.

However, he said he is still interested in electoral politics and local issues. “My goal was to run for United States Congress this year, but I decided not to because Annabelle Robertson, who is way more qualified than I am, decided to run (against Republican South Carolina Rep. Joe “You Lie” Wilson). So I decided to put my action behind her and get out and protest.”

Critics point to the “Rally at the Border,” in San Ysidro, Calif., the only other rally Nathaniel has organized. It failed amid concerns of top-down organizing that didn’t take the needs of the community into consideration, and could have put a lot of people at risk.

Once news of the failed border rally became public, people began demanding to see the permit for the march on Washington. Nathaniel says he has a permit and has met with D.C. police, Park Police, the Secret Service and the FBI.

But for local organizers in San Ysidro and D.C., working with the authorities is precisely the problem: Washington, D.C.’s police department threw more than 70 grenades and emptied hundreds of canisters of pepper spray at the Disrupt J20 protest during the inauguration. At a right-wing rally recently, Park Police claimed to be working with right-wing militias.

“In D.C., we do not like interfacing with police,” Brendan Orsinger, an organizer in D.C., told me. “We don’t like the idea of the state giving permission for us to march. And we don’t need it. … It’s actually much safer not to have police involved in the planning of the march.”

Orsinger has been vociferous in his criticism of the march. But like Troy, he doesn’t see a conspiracy: “There are good intentions here. But one of the things that I learned over the last year is that good intentions are not good enough to make change happen in this country.”

This raises the larger question: What are protests for? The prosecution of the nearly 200 people charged with rioting charges after the inauguration may have had a chilling effect, but it has also shown the effectiveness of protest—if the U.S. Attorney’s office works that hard to shut them down, then they must have some power.

So, the question becomes: How can a larger movement bring together Russiagaters like Troy, local grassroots organizers like Orsinger, and enthusiastic young people like Nathaniel? If people really want to resist and not just #Resist, they need to answer this question while embracing a diversity of tactics and figuring out how to form coalitions.

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a project of alternative newspapers across the country. Email: baynard@therealnews.com. Twitter: @baynardwoods.

I got drunk recently and read all (as of then) 2,735 tweets that Donald Trump has written since the election, in the hopes that Trump’s Twitter feed—collected and searchable on trumptwitterarchive.com—might be a good way to get a sense of the horrors we’ve endured.

Looking at the tweets was like reliving all of the unbelievable moments since the 2016 election in fast motion. It’s important not to forget that we used to not have to deal with the dread of waking up each morning to realize that Donald Trump is president, and scramble madly to check Twitter to make sure we’re not at war. A year ago, all of this was new to us.

So here are 10 of Trump’s tweets, in chronological order, that capture something about the authoritarian nature of this presidency, or the insanity of our social media moment. I left off some obvious favorites (covfefe!) and tended to favor some earlier ones that prefigured later themes. They’re presented here verbatim, with no editing.

1. Nov 10, 2016 09:19:44 PM: Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair

Even though it is from the period between the election and Inauguration Day, this tweet is in many ways the most representative tweet of the Trump presidency. It is only Trump’s fourth post-election tweet, but it captures the spirit of his feed: validate Trump + attack enemies + attack media = complain about affront to Trump.

2. Nov 19, 2016 08:56:30 AM: The Theater must always be a safe and special place.The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!

This tweet is about the VP-elect’s attendance of the hit play Hamilton, whose cast ended the performance with a short speech expressing the concern we all felt in those uncertain days while hoping “this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”

But Trump took this as an opportunity to remind us of the depths of his cynicism when he demanded a safe space for a powerful white man. Brandon Victor Dixon, who gave the speech, is black, and Trump has made a habit of demanding apologies from black people.

This tweet barely made the list, just edging out Trump’s claim, also in November, that “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!” Both introduce autocratic themes we’ve seen develop over the year.

3. Feb 2, 2017 06:13:13 AM:If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?

This reminds me of a line from an Oedipus play. Read it again with that in mind. Tragic.

8. Sep 30, 2017 06:26:16 AM: ...Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They……

Sep 30, 2017 06:29:47 AM:want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.

OK, this is two tweets. But he’s attacking the mayor of a devastated city and using racist stereotypes all in one. (He seemingly practiced for this after the London terrorist attack.)

9. Nov 29, 2017 07:16:21 AM: Wow, Matt Lauer was just fired from NBC for “inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.” But when will the top executives at NBC & Comcast be fired for putting out so much Fake News. Check out Andy Lack’s past!

The complete cynicism of the entire administration becomes painfully clear here. Remember how tough Lauer was on Clinton as he bro-ed it up with Trump during the election? And remember the 16 allegations of sexual harassment against Trump? Yeah. He still went there.

10. Dec 2, 2017 12:14:13 PM: I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!*

This one has an asterisk beside it because when it seemed like it could be an admission that Trump obstructed justice in the investigation of Flynn, Trump lawyer John Dowd claimed that he actually wrote the tweet.

Bonus retweet: I couldn’t not include this, because it’s Trump retweeting Laura Ingraham responding to a story I wrote:

The New York Times opinion page tweeted: Nov 20, 2017 9:38 PM: Charles Manson wasn't the inevitable outgrowth of the Sixties. If anything, he was a harbinger of today's far right.

Ingraham quoted that and wrote: Nov 21, 2017 8:37 PML “Far right”? You mean “right so far,” as in @realDonaldTrump has been right so far abt how to kick the economy into high gear.

And Trump retweeted it, somehow both proving my point and completing the circle of my year.

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a project of alternative newspapers across the country. Email: baynard@therealnews.com. Twitter: @baynardwoods.

Donald Trump had the audacity to attend the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson last Saturday, Dec. 9.

“I knew a little before everybody else, but I’ll simply say this without even referencing Trump himself,” Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba told me when the visit was announced. “The opening of the Civil Rights Museum is an important moment of a recognition of struggle, and out of that struggle, we’ve seen people historically rescue themselves in a state that has been known for some of the most negativity that the world has ever seen.”

Lumumba took Trump’s election last year with a certain level of equanimity, saying that on the day after the election, “I woke up in Mississippi, which means whether it is Obama, Clinton or Bush, Mississippi is still at the bottom.”

But Trump’s refusal to condemn the white supremacists in Charlottesville caused many civil rights leaders, including Rep. John Lewis, to threaten to boycott the opening if the president attended. But it wasn’t just about Charlottesville: White supremacy may be the only consistent ideology of the Trump administration.

“We have to observe this corrosion of integrity and this erosion of people’s human and civil rights and identify what role or what steps we’re willing to take,” Lumumba said. “It’s important that we recognize that struggle. But any celebration of struggle, any recognition of struggle, must consider what the next step forward is.”

Trump, being Trump, made the controversy worse by seeming to support a justification of slavery. Days before the presidential visit to the first state-sponsored civil rights museum, Roy Moore, the Alabama senate candidate who is supported by the president despite allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior with minors, went viral, saying that America “was great at the time when families were united—even though we had slavery, they cared for one another.”

Just in case there was any question about what Trump thought of this definition of his “Make America Great Again” catch phrase, the very next day he tweeted: “LAST thing the Make America Great Again Agenda needs is a Liberal Democrat in Senate where we have so little margin for victory already. The Pelosi/Schumer Puppet Jones would vote against us 100% of the time. He’s bad on Crime, Life, Border, Vets, Guns & Military. VOTE ROY MOORE!”

When he finally got to Jackson, Trump—who was invited by the state’s white Republican governor—spoke to a small crowd, primarily reading from a script, and not at the main event. “The fight to end slavery, to break down Jim Crow, to end segregation, to gain the right to vote, and to achieve the sacred birthright of equality—that’s big stuff,” Trump said. “Those are very big phrases, very big words.”

Lumumba has some more big words for Trump. He wants Jackson—a city in deeply red Mississippi, with a long history of racism and white supremacy—to be the “most radical city” in the world.

“Ultimately, what I mean by being the most radical city on the planet is giving people more access,” he told my colleague Jaisal Noor. “We do this through the … movement of people’s assemblies that allow people to speak to their conditions, and so that is very important to us.”

People’s assemblies are “vehicles of Black self-determination and autonomous political authority of the oppressed peoples’ and communities in Jackson,” according to the Jackson-Kush Plan, a document produced by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) and the Jackson People’s Assembly. “The assemblies are organized as expressions of participatory or direct democracy, wherein there is guided facilitation and agenda setting provided by the committees that compose the people’s task force, but no preordained hierarchy.”

The movement grew out of a collaboration of black activist groups forming in the Mississippi River Delta in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction, and quickly managed to take over the city of Jackson, when Lumumba’s father won the mayorship in 2012.

“Free the land” was a common refrain in the elder Lumumba’s first campaign. It came from his trip to Mississippi in 1971 to start an autonomous black nation in that state with the “Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika.” To get to their land, Lumumba and his comrades had to face down the Ku Klux Klan. This weekend, with the president’s visit, his son, who succeeded him as mayor, had to take a similar stand.

The younger Lumumba had resisted repeated calls to run for office. But after his father died in 2014, he decided to run. He won a decisive victory earlier this year, giving some hope as to what a city can do, outside of larger national trends. Lumumba and the People’s Assemblies offer a serious alternative to Trumpian authoritarianism.

“A radical is a person who seeks change,” he said. “A radical is a person who does not accept the conditions as they see them. But we look at the conditions of our community, and we see a need for change. Then the reality is we need to be as radical as the circumstances dictate we should be.”

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a project of alternative newspapers across the country. Email: baynard@therealnews.com. Twitter: @baynardwoods.

After the automotive attack in New York City on Oct. 31, Donald Trump called for the death penalty for the perpetrator.

“Would love to send the NYC terrorist to Guantanamo but statistically that process takes much longer than going through the federal system …” he tweeted about the suspect, Sayfullo Saipov. “There is also something appropriate about keeping him in the home of the horrible crime he committed. Should move fast. DEATH PENALTY!”

It’s hard not to compare this response to his “both sides” response to the automotive terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Va. Trump has built his political career on demonizing Islam, but neither he nor his staff have condemned white nationalist terrorist organizations—whose ideology they continue to openly espouse.

When Trump was asked whether or not James Alex Fields—who on Aug. 12 drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters, killing Heather Heyer and seriously injuring 12 others—was a terrorist, he dissembled. “And there is a question. Is it murder? Is it terrorism? Then you get into legal semantics. The driver of the car is a murderer, and what he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing."

By calling Fields a murderer, rather than a terrorist, Trump is able to maintain the myth that white-supremacist terrorists are bad actors in a field of otherwise “fine people.”

Trump regularly mentions “our heritage” when he talks about the Confederate monuments that the Nazis descended on Charlottesville to defend. And his chief of staff, John Kelly, once laughably called “the adult in the room,” recently said that Robert E. Lee was an “honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state,” and that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”

Our racist nation finds it easy to condemn all Muslims as terrorists. And, since the “anarchist bombings” of the 19th century, we’ve also easily associated the left with terrorism. At press time, a “We the People” petition to “formally recognize Antifa as a terrorist organization” had 362,010 signatures. The entire right-wing mediasphere has been flipping out over an imagined “November 4” conspiracy where Antifa was supposed to go door to door killing white people and Christians.

And yet, despite mounting evidence of conspiracy and murderous intent, there have been virtually no calls to declare Vanguard America, or related groups, terrorist organizations.

On Aug. 12, James Alex Fields was photographed wearing the uniform and carrying the shield of Vanguard America. The first thing I saw when I got to Charlottesville was Vanguard America members chanting: “You can’t run; you can’t hide; you get helicopter rides!” at leftist protesters, whom they then attacked with sticks. The chant was a reference to Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing death squads. Some press outlets have been woefully gullible at allowing these organizations to call such threats jokes—even when they are accompanied by actual violence.

Thanks to a series of chats on a gaming app uncovered by the media collective Unicorn Riot, we know that people involved in planning the rallies also “joked” about running people over with their cars. Then Fields followed through, committing murder.

Others involved in Vanguard America have shown that the organization as a whole, and not just Fields, had terrorist intent. William Fears, who spent much of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville trying to stab people with a flag pole, has identified himself as a member of Vanguard America. He; his brother Colton; and another man named Tyler Tenbrink were in Gainesville, Fla., following the flop of a Nazi rally led by Richard Spencer. They allegedly pulled their Jeep up to a group of anti-fascist protesters and began yelling, “Heil Hitler.” Someone in the group hit their Jeep with a baton. The three men then jumped out of their Jeep, and the Fears brothers reportedly yelled, “I’m going to fucking kill you,” and, “Shoot them!” as Tenbrink got out of the car with a gun and fired it at the people.

“Us coming in and saying we’re taking over your town, we’re starting to push back, we’re starting to want to intimidate back,” Fears had told the Gainesville Sun earlier that day. “We want to show our teeth a little bit, because, you know, we’re not to be taken lightly. We don’t want violence; we don’t want harm. But at the end of the day, we’re not opposed to defending ourselves.”

Then he justified the Charlottesville terrorist attack carried out by James Alex Fields as self-defense.

“They threw the first blow,” he said. “I look at it as self-defense whether he just was radicalized and said, ‘You know, I’m just going to mow these people down,’ or whether he was in fear for his life—but they threw the first blow, so I’m going to take his side.”

Fears, who says he was previously radicalized in prison, was arrested along with his brother and Tenbrink and charged with attempted murder.

So here we have a situation in which a member of Vanguard America justifies a murder committed by another member of the same group hours before allegedly attempting to commit another murder—both actions seemingly based on political ideology. What else do we need to treat Vanguard America like we do window-breaking leftists wearing black?

After I wrote the original version of this story went to press, the terrorist attack on a church in Texas took place, with 26 people killed. The perpetrator was white—and the president has not yet called him a terrorist or suggested Guantanamo.

If suspects wear all-black and look like punks, then they are all responsible for any crime committed by someone who looks like them, as the arrest of 200 people on Inauguration Day shows. If suspects have brown skin, then Trump, Kelly, Vanguard America and the rest of the alt-right see them as terrorists, even in the absence of an actual crime. This idea of collective, preemptive guilt is enshrined in extreme vetting. But polo-wearing white guys are never judged as part of a group—even when they wear its uniforms or carry its shields. That’s how white supremacy works.

Baynard Woods is a reporter at the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a joint project of alternative newspapers across the country, including the Coachella Valley Independent. Email Baynard@democracyincrisis.com; Twitter @baynardwoods.